What should I track in a trading journal?

Most journals fail the same way: they record the outcome and skip the decision. Entry, exit, profit. That version cannot teach you anything, because the outcome is already in your account balance and the decision that produced it is gone.

The fields that earn their place

Before the trade: the thesis in one sentence (what has to be true for this trade to work), entry price, stop, target, position size, and the percent of the account at risk. The one-sentence limit is the feature: a thesis you cannot state in a sentence is a feeling wearing a trade.

After the trade: exit price and time, and what you did between entry and exit. Moved the stop, added, trimmed, panicked, held to plan. Management is where most of the money leaks, and it is invisible unless you write it.

One line about your state. Not a diary entry. Rushed, calm, chasing, bored. Patterns in that single word predict more than most indicators.

What the discipline buys you

With those fields, every trade can be judged on what you knew at the time, which is the only fair test. A disciplined loss reads as disciplined. A reckless win reads as reckless, before the market pays it anyway. Give it enough trades and the repeats become visible: the same setup oversized, the same early exit, the same Tuesday.

Enough trades is the honest catch. Around 25, a repeated pattern starts to separate from luck; under that, a streak proves nothing in either direction. The arithmetic behind that number is written out in the noise-floor piece linked below. Until you are there, the job is simply to log every trade the same way, because a journal with gaps flatters exactly the trades that need the light.